From a Different Mirror by Ronald Takaki
The construction of the Central Pacific Railroad line was a Chinese achievement. They performed the physical labor required to lay the tracks and provided important technical labor such as operating power drills and handling explosives for boring the tunnels through Donner Summit. The Chinese workers were, in one observer's description, "a great army laying siege to Nature in her strongest citadel. The rugged mountains looked like stupendous ant-hills. They swarmed with Celestials, shoveling, wheeling, carting, drilling and blasting rocks and earth." Time was critical to the company's interest, for the amount of payment it received in land and subsidy from the federal government was based on the miles of track it built. Determined to accelerate construction, the managers forced the Chinese laborers to work through the winter of 1866. Snow drifts, over sixty feet tall, covered construction operations. The workers lived and worked in tunnels under the snow, with shafts for air and lanterns for light. Work was dangerous, occasionally deadly. "The snow slides carried away our camps and we lost a good many men in those slides," a company official reported matter-of-factly; "many of them we did not find until the next season when the snow melted."
The Chinese workers struck that spring. Demanding wages of $45 a month and an eight-hour day, five thousand laborers walked out "as one man." The company offered to raise their wages from $31 to $35 a month, but the strikers stood by their original demands. "Eight hours a day good for white men, all the same good for Chinamen," they declared. The San Francisco Alta condemned the strike as a conspiracy: "The foundation of this strike appears to have been a circular, printed in the Chinese language, sent among them by designing persons for the purpose of destroying their efficiency as laborers." The insinuation was transparent: the strikers' demands had been merely drummed up, with agents of the competing Union Pacific behind the Chinese protest. The intent was to nullify the possibility that the workers themselves had minds and wills and were capable of acting in their own interest. Meanwhile, the managers moved to break the strike. They wired New York to inquire about the feasibility of transporting ten thousand blacks to replace the striking Chinese. Superintendent Crocker isolated the strikers and cut off their food suplly. "I stopped the provisions on them," he stated, "stopped the butchers from butchering, and used such coercive measures." Coercion worked. Virtually imprisoned in their camps in the Sierras and starving, the strikers surrendered within a week."
The Chinese workers struck that spring. Demanding wages of $45 a month and an eight-hour day, five thousand laborers walked out "as one man." The company offered to raise their wages from $31 to $35 a month, but the strikers stood by their original demands. "Eight hours a day good for white men, all the same good for Chinamen," they declared. The San Francisco Alta condemned the strike as a conspiracy: "The foundation of this strike appears to have been a circular, printed in the Chinese language, sent among them by designing persons for the purpose of destroying their efficiency as laborers." The insinuation was transparent: the strikers' demands had been merely drummed up, with agents of the competing Union Pacific behind the Chinese protest. The intent was to nullify the possibility that the workers themselves had minds and wills and were capable of acting in their own interest. Meanwhile, the managers moved to break the strike. They wired New York to inquire about the feasibility of transporting ten thousand blacks to replace the striking Chinese. Superintendent Crocker isolated the strikers and cut off their food suplly. "I stopped the provisions on them," he stated, "stopped the butchers from butchering, and used such coercive measures." Coercion worked. Virtually imprisoned in their camps in the Sierras and starving, the strikers surrendered within a week."
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